Protected superconducting qubits such as the
0-
π qubit promise to substantially suppress error rates, facilitating fault-tolerant quantum computing with fewer qubits. Measuring these qubits is challenging due to their protected nature, and thus far no concrete proposal exists for how to measure them without breaking their protection. Here we show how to perform protected measurements of the
0-
π qubit in two orthogonal bases. The protection of these measurements is facilitated by their quantum non-demolition nature, allowing faults on ancillary measurement qubits to be tolerated. As experimental progress pushes protected qubits further into the low error-rate regime, our techniques will be crucial for fault-tolerant universal control.
Superconducting qubits, while promising for scalability and long coherence times, contain more than two energy levels, and therefore are susceptible to errors generated by the leakage of population outside of the computational subspace. Such leakage errors constitute a prominent roadblock towards fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) with superconducting qubits. FTQC using topological codes is based on sequential measurements of multiqubit stabilizer operators. Here, we first propose a leakage-resilient procedure to perform repetitive measurements of multiqubit stabilizer operators, and then use this scheme as an ingredient to develop a leakage-resilient approach for surface code quantum error correction with superconducting circuits. Our protocol is based on swap operations between data and ancilla qubits at the end of every cycle, requiring read-out and reset operations on every physical qubit in the system, and thereby preventing persistent leakage errors from occurring.